Day: April 4, 2019

Post navigation

As a divided government battles a divided parliament over a way forward, the chorus of characters who can now influence events has grown, flummoxing news-reading algorithms, or ‘algos’, which are designed to parse phrases from recognized speakers before executing a trade.

“The model signals are more quantitative driven and rely on historical data feeds,” said Neil Jones, head of hedge fund currency sales at Mizuho in London.

“Brexit headlines have thrown a spanner in their works for the sheer number of characters moving the currency on a daily basis.”

First, people were often surprised to be asked their views, saying they felt they weren’t important enough for anyone in London to ask. People plied me with tea, biscuits and sandwiches, took me on tractor rides and to the bingo and made a few jokey marriage proposals. Most said they still wanted to get out of Europe.

Their reasons were more individual and varied than I expected.

Some wanted to revive a nostalgic rosy past or keep immigrants out. Some thought they were taking back control, some wanted an end to the EU bureaucracy that they saw hurting their livelihoods and some – like a cockle-picker in Flookburgh – thought it was time London paid attention to smaller voices.

The presence of more than 200 Chinese fishing boats near an island occupied by Manila in the disputed South China Sea is illegal and a clear violation of Philippine sovereignty, the country’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

“Such actions when not repudiated by the Chinese government are deemed to have been adopted by it,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a rare rebuke of Beijing.

The Democratic head of a powerful U.S. House committee asked the Internal Revenue Service for six years of President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns on Wednesday, in a long-awaited move widely expected to lead to a long court battle with the White House.

The request, in a letter from Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, is viewed by Democrats in the House of Representatives as a vital first step toward oversight of Trump’s income taxes and business network, which some lawmakers believe could be rife with conflicts of interest and potential tax law violations.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has severed ties with Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp as U.S. authorities investigate the Chinese firms for alleged sanctions violations, it said on Wednesday.

MIT is the latest top U.S. education institution to unplug telecom equipment made by Huawei and other Chinese companies to avoid losing federal funding.

“MIT is not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions,” Maria Zuber, its vice president for research, said bit.ly/2K528XI in a letter on its website.

Australia will fine social media and web hosting companies up to 10 percent of their annual global turnover and imprison executives for up to three years if violent content is not removed “expeditiously” under a new law.

The new law passed by parliament on Thursday is in response to a lone gunman attack on two mosques in Christchurch on March 15 which killed 50 people as they attended Friday prayers.

The gunman broadcasted his attack live on Facebook and it was widely shared for over an hour before being removed, a timeframe Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described as unacceptable.

House Democrats advanced their flagship net neutrality bill on Wednesday, clearing the final hurdle before a floor vote next week.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee in a 30-22 party-line vote approved the Save the Internet Act, which would reinstate the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Obama-era regulations requiring internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally.

The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill’s markup that lasted 9 1/2 hours.

The Trump administration plans to punish the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for the continuing flow of migrants by cutting foreign aid to these Northern Triangle countries.

This approach demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of current migration at the southern border. These policies are likely to increase human trafficking, decrease U.S. security, hurt the economy, and exacerbate underlying drivers of migration.

Combating the crisis within sending countries will take money, political will, and time. It requires acknowledging true causes and working toward sustainable change.